-  Week 18  +

invention, intellectual property, and income

Tasks

  • Develop a plan for dissemination of your final project
  • Prepare a summary slide and video clip in your root directory
  • licensing

    Following are the range of licenses available:

    1. Creative Commons License, public copyright license, it is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that he/she has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, he/she might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of his/her own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
    2. GNU General Public License (GPL), free software license, guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. It is a copyleft license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses.
    3. GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), free software license, was developed as a compromise between the strong copyleft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and more permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License. The word "Lesser" in the title shows that the LGPL does not guarantee the end user's complete freedom in the use of software; it only guarantees the freedom of modification for components licensed under the LGPL, but not for any proprietary components.
    4. BSD License, permissive free software license, imposes less restrictions on the use and redistribution of covered software. The BSD license is a simple license that merely requires that all code licensed under the BSD license be licensed under the BSD license if redistributed in source code format.
    5. MIT License, permissive free software license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, an excellent license compatibility. The MIT license permits reuse within proprietary software provided that all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms and the copyright notice.
    6. Apache License, permissive free software license, requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer. Like other free software licenses, the license allows the user of the software the freedom to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software, under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties.

    After having briefly gone through a range of licenses available, I choose to have a closer look at MIT License and Creative Commons License.

    THE MIT LICENSE

    It is one of the most popular software license, compatible with many copyleft licenses, and could be integrated into other software licenses like GNU General Public License (GPL).

    Below is a common form of the MIT License:

    Copyright < YEAR > < COPYRIGHT HOLDER >

    "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE."

    Summary - It being permissive to linking of the licensed code with code licensed under a different license, distribution of the code to third parties, modification of the code by a licensee, allowing private use and sublicensing, makes it an excellent compatible license putting only very limited restriction on reuse. It infact gives an opportunity, to protect licensees from patent claims made by code contributors regarding their contribution, and protection of contributors from patent claims made by licensees and use of trademarks associated with the licensed code or its contributors by a licensee.

    CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE 4.0

    Creative Commons assists licensor to legally share knowledge and creativity to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world. It provides free, easy-to-use copyright to make a simple and standardized way to give the public permission to share, giving licensor an opportunity to set conditions for the use of their creative work. It is copylefted to linking, distributing and modifying of the licensed code giving an option of personal usage.

    In contrast to copyright law, which gives an author to prohibit recipients from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of their work, copyleft author may give every person who receives a copy of the work permission to reproduce, adapt, or distribute it, with the accompanying requirement that modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well, complying with the same licensing agreement.

    Before determinging which Creative Commons License is right for my work I read licensing considerations to make appropriate choices. I learned that there are three layers of licenses- legal code, human readable and machine readable. Taken together, these three layers of licenses ensure that the spectrum of rights isn’t just a legal concept. It’s something that the creators of works can understand, their users can understand, and even the Web itself can understand.

    Types of Licenses
    The CC license comprises a selection out of the following four conditions:

    Attribution (BY) - Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits in the manner specified by these.
    Share-alike (SA) - Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical ("not more restrictive") to the license that governs the original work. Without share-alike, derivative works might be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses.
    Non-commercial (NC) - Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes.
    No Derivative Works (ND) - Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works and remixes based on it.

    This table sums up seven regularly used licenses:

    Summary - There’s no right or wrong Creative Commons license, its just that some licenses are more appropriate for some applications than others. Its a common mistake that licensors make, thinking that the license they’re using allows types of reuse that it actually restricts, or vice versa. When deciding which license to apply to your work, ask yourself what types of reuse you’d like to encourage, and license accordingly.

    My choice
    CC provides global recognition and has international application. Its easy to choose, easy to understand, easy to find, offering flexibility and integrity in its licensing model. It is legally sound and remix ready. Assists with internal rights management and reduces licence proliferation. It also supports community building with a culture of sharing and provides access to infrastructure with support materials. Based on these benifits that creative commons license offers, I made a choice to get it for my work at Fab Academy.

    Getting a License
    Following screenshots explains the process of getting Creative Commons License 4.0.

    "This is how I get started"

    "After pushing on to get started tab, license features panel appeared. In this panel, I allowed adaptations of my work to be shared as long as others share alike but preventedprevented it for commercial use."

    "Upon checking my options in the license feactures panel, my selection appeared in the above panel"
    Attribution-NonCommercial-3.ShareAlike 4.0 International
    This is not a Free Culture License.

    "In the subsequent panel, I am offered to fill out a machine-readable metadata to the suggested HTML. This would help others to attribute me."

    "Since, this part was optional, I choose to go with it and clicked link. Then above panel appeared."

    "I provided title of my work, my name and URL in -attribute work to-section".

    "Since, the process is easy to comprehend, and simple to navigate, I was able to choose an appropirate license for my work in less than 5 minutes. This is how it looked like."

    "Once, I had the code of license, I copied it and pasted it in the footer section at every page. And finally, it looks like this."

    future opportunities

    1. Upon sucessful completion of the project, I will be testing few more prototypes for its functioning with different permutations and combinations. Mostly, I will be exhibiting my final project at Maker Fest, an Indian continuation of Maker Faire hosted across America, Europe, Africa and Japan. This will give me an opportunity, for the first time to display my work outside of maker's community and assist me to reach out to city dewllers.
    2. I will be reaching out to a few curators of art galleries in my town, Ahmedabad, to have them installed in thier galleries as a functional element and not just an object on display.
    3. Third opportunity, I see is to bring the project to students of architecture at CEPT University, where I teach and showcase it as an idea, realised using digital fabrication tools and techniques, pushing thier boundaries to think out of box and use digital tools to realise them.